


Veins of the Earth

by voidknight



Series: Assorted Statements from the Archives, dated 2017-2018 [3]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Buried Alive, Gardens & Gardening, Gen, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), References to Canon, Screenplay/Script Format, Season/Series 04, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives), plants but scary, serious but non graphic injuries, set between 128 and 132, the buried coffin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:20:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25544281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voidknight/pseuds/voidknight
Summary: Statement of Clovis McCormack, regarding a tunnel underneath his allotment.
Series: Assorted Statements from the Archives, dated 2017-2018 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1812076
Comments: 4
Kudos: 3





	Veins of the Earth

**Author's Note:**

> shoutout to my dad for feedback, edits, and gardening tips
> 
> title is a quote from shakespeare's tempest!

_Tape clicks on._

CLOVIS: Sorry about all the dirt.

ARCHIVIST: It’s—fine.

CLOVIS: I can’t really help it anymore.

ARCHIVIST: I understand. Oh, uh, take a seat. I’m sorry about the, ah…

CLOVIS: What, the coffin?

_He sits. There’s the sound of him shifting around in his chair._

CLOVIS: Don’t worry about it. I kinda like it, to be honest.

ARCHIVIST: Right.

CLOVIS: Yeah, it’s… I don’t know. It feels nice.

ARCHIVIST: I see.

CLOVIS: That isn’t weird, is it? Like, you’d think that after everything that happened, I wouldn’t look at a spooky coffin with “Do Not Open” on it and think “ooh, I wanna open that”?

ARCHIVIST: It’s not just you. …Now, if we could begin…

CLOVIS: Sure. From the beginning?

ARCHIVIST: Yes.

_There’s a soft surge of static, as if he’s trying to Know what summary to give Clovis’ statement, but it quiets down after a moment._

ARCHIVIST: Statement of Clovis McCormack, regarding… a tunnel underneath his allotment in Bath. Statement taken direct from subject, 8th March, 2018. Statement begins.

CLOVIS: Well, technically it wasn’t _my_ allotment. It was my parents’. But they’d stopped taking proper care of it years ago, and I figured that sprucing it up was a well overdue project.

I’m not in school right now. I finished secondary school last year, and next year I’m headed off to university, but I decided to take a year out before that. Part of the reason for that is that I’ve always fancied being a gardener, and what better way to get my hands dirty than to take charge of the allotment? I know tons about plants, and I’ve done a bunch of volunteer work in local gardens and farms over the past few years, so it was just waiting to happen!

When I first started my work last spring, the plot was all filled with weeds and dead things, plus a sprawling blackberry bramble that was beginning to encroach upon my neighbors’ territory. And the soil was no good either. No compost. So I used a bunch of my savings to buy all sorts of seeds and plants and saplings, and I began my work turning the dry, boring plot into a proper vegetable garden.

I guess I don’t need to bore you with the details of how I got it into its current state. It was a ton of work, but I found myself enjoying it a lot! Yeah, I know how it sounds, but there’s really nothing like feeling the rich earth crumbling under your fingers, or driving a shovel into the ground, or—oh.

_There’s a shuffling of fabric. The Archivist makes a noise of displeasure._

ARCHIVIST: That looks like a nasty cut; do you need—?

CLOVIS: Oh, no, I came prepared.

_Rummaging, as if through a pocket, then the sound of gauze as it is wrapped around a limb._

CLOVIS: Got a bit too animated there, ha.

ARCHIVIST: Go on. Statement resumes.

CLOVIS: So, the, uh, the _incident_ happened a couple weeks ago. February… middle of February. Couldn’t say what date. I was digging the whole thing over, getting ready for when the last frost had passed and I could plant new seeds. I had my heart set on a patch of courgettes. That’s a classic. Oh, beetroot too, and carrots. I do love vegetables that grow underground—it’s a lot of fun pulling them up, brushing them off, and snacking on them while you harvest. Oh! And then potatoes—I was going to plant some potatoes that day, but I guess I never got around to it, did I?

My plot’s a small one, maybe five square meters. I’ve still got the blackberry bush, but now most of it is taken up by rows of vegetables with some flowers interspersed. Oh, there’s the old apple tree too, but it doesn’t bear much fruit.

Anyway, I had a couple late parsnips that still needed to be harvested, so after I dug up the bottom half of the plot and pulled out most of the weeds, I set to work on those. They’re at the very top of the allotment, right by the apple tree. The parsnips this year were huge! So you can imagine how pleased I was pulling them up.

At least until I tugged the last one free of the earth and noticed… something right underneath where it had sat.

That’s not quite right. There was nothing underneath it, and by that I mean _nothing._ There was a hole. It was deep and black but it was definitely a hole. Like… an entire cavern, just a couple centimeters under the soil of my plot. Like the parsnip had been the cork in an enormous, empty bottle.

It made no sense. Believe me when I say there was absolutely no way that cavity could have been there. The soil that the parsnips grew in wasn’t nearly hard-packed enough to have covered up such a thing without falling into it, collapsing in on itself. And I _definitely_ should have found it last time I was digging around this area. Unless it was a new hole? But what could have made something like that?

Well, I instantly stuck my hand down there, and when nothing came up to bite my fingers, I figured I was safe, hah. I started to claw away at the edges. The soil was much brittler than it should have been; I suppose that’s how it kept in place with the massive cavern underneath it! I had to be careful about where I was kneeling; I didn’t want to accidentally fall through the too-thin earth.

Pretty soon I had uncovered a pit about a meter wide. It descended down into blackness. My head was spinning; I glanced about, but it was just after noon on a Tuesday and no one was around in the allotments surrounding mine. I turned on the light on my phone and shone it down into the hole. It was two meters deep, approximately, and when illuminated revealed that it was not a simple cavern but rather the entrance to a sort of tunnel—a path, leading off god knows where.

It worries me slightly how immediately and enthusiastically I lowered myself down into the earthy chamber. The ground at the bottom was hard and dry; to my left, a small opening led into the tunnel. I’m pretty short, but I still had to duck my head to get through. When I held my phone out in front of me, the tunnel continued for longer than the torch could light up. It sloped gently downwards into cool blackness.

In my defense, it was looking like I had a pretty clear escape. It wouldn’t be too hard to climb back out the way I had come if something went wrong. Plus, I could always call someone to help—a meter-wide pit in the ground is hard to miss. The walls of the tunnel were damp but sturdy; I have to say it looked pretty safe.

Then again, maybe I was just rationalizing it to myself because I… well, I really, _really_ wanted to go down that tunnel. The feeling in my chest was that of a young kid happening across a cave in the woods. I’d been that kid, running off to find the smallest nooks and crannies in the rocky outcroppings, squeezing myself into the tiniest spaces I could. My own little private hideaways. I had this fantasy as a six- or seven-year-old—falling asleep, cradled by the earth, and waking to find that centuries had passed, that moss and creeping vines grew over my still body.

Maybe that was a little morbid, now that I think about it. But it was a desire satiated by working my hands through the dirt of my allotment, placing living things into its depths and pulling them back out when it was time. And now, gazing into this corridor of nothing but black earth, I again felt that desire but multiplied a thousandfold.

And so I stepped in! I had to crouch a little, but I moved through the tunnel easily, like… like a shovel through mud, if I wanted to pick a nice, thematic simile. Plenty of roots hung down from the ceiling, most notably from my neighbor’s grapevines. Hmm… I should plant some grapevines. I do love grapes.

It was a round tunnel, and it honestly reminded me of an animal burrow—an old one, an abandoned one. Had it been traversed before by anyone other than me? I couldn’t say. I wasn’t thinking straight. I ran my hands along the damp walls. They weren’t smooth; they certainly hadn’t been excavated by human tools.

As I went deeper and deeper, and further and further downwards, the stillness and the silence became more pronounced. I’d almost forgotten that there _was_ an entrance back into the above-world. I did glance back once or twice, I think, but the shaft behind me was shrouded in shadow, and after a certain point I couldn’t distinguish the walls from the space in between them.

I think that was the point at which I began to feel afraid.

It wasn’t a sharp fear, though. No panic ever came over me. I didn’t even think to stop or turn around, even as the tunnel narrowed, even as I got so deep that roots could no longer reach me. It was more like a growing mass in my stomach, this pronounced feeling of inevitability. Like dreading something that you _know_ you must face.

I could sense the weight of all those meters and meters of soil and dirt above me, and it made me feel… _safe_ isn’t the right word, but now that I’m saying it, I can’t think of anything better. It was like… oh, this is going to sound silly. It was like I had made peace with the Earth. Like I was now part of something bigger than me, something which had given life and nourishment to all my plants up above, and I was… privileged, almost, to be a part of it. I think I might’ve cried. I choked up, at least. I tried to breathe deeply, but breathing was difficult down there.

At some point I had to start crawling on my hands and knees. I couldn’t really keep holding my phone, so I put it in my pocket. I remember checking briefly to see if I had any signal, and, predictably, I didn’t.

For the rest of the way I was in complete darkness. I could now feel the soil beneath my fingers, soft and moist. A wonderful bed for seeds. Maybe I was a seed. Maybe I would sprout down here, in the cool and the quiet.

My back scraped against the damp ceiling. I think I might’ve wanted to turn around, but it was much too late for that now. Besides, I had no space to do so anymore.

Eventually, I came to the end. It was a tiny, tiny hollow—just big enough that I could curl myself into a ball and fit snugly into the space. And so I did. I didn’t even think to shine my light on it. As I lay down, I could tell that I was surrounded by roots again—they tickled my shoulder and forehead, and dug into my back, soft but insistent. I think they wanted—ha. I think they wanted to… to grow _into_ me. Like I was their soil, their compost. Like they could drain water from my blood, and I would feed them.

I fell asleep easily. It was so peaceful down there. So serene. With layers upon layers of soil as my blanket.

And I woke up in the hospital two weeks later!

Well, I suppose that’s pretty much it, isn’t it? There was a frantic search while I was gone—turns out the entrance to the tunnel had collapsed at some point while I was in there, and it took… a while to excavate. Can’t believe I survived, honestly! But, yeah. There you go.

ARCHIVIST: Statement ends. …Hmm. I can’t say I’m all that surprised.

CLOVIS: About what?

ARCHIVIST: About your… survival.

CLOVIS: Really?

ARCHIVIST: Pardon the odd question, but have you ever… felt the urge to… Christ, this sounds awful. Have you ever wanted to bury _people_ underground, like you do with your… your plants. To… make them _feel_ what you felt.

CLOVIS: I… no?? No, I mean—I guess I’ve always been a bit of an advocate for getting your hands dirty, playing around in the dirt, going without the gardening gloves, but—I’m not gonna start burying people alive, for god’s sake!

ARCHIVIST: Sorry. I—sorry, I shouldn’t presume—

CLOVIS: Has anyone ever come here and told you they wanted to bury you alive?? Is that the sorta people who turn up at your Institute?

ARCHIVIST: No, well, not _quite,_ I—shouldn’t have asked.

_He coughs. An awkward pause._

ARCHIVIST: You said you were drawn to the coffin.

CLOVIS: Yeah, a bit. Not sure why.

ARCHIVIST: Would you. Uh.

CLOVIS: ...What.

ARCHIVIST, _muttering to himself:_ No, no, that’s stupid; can’t have a kid risk—

CLOVIS: I’m not a kid?

ARCHIVIST: Never mind.

CLOVIS: Are you… asking me if I want to go in the coffin.

ARCHIVIST: Um.

CLOVIS: ‘Cause I totally will—!

_He stands. The noise of the Archivist’s chair being pushed back as he jumps up as well._

ARCHIVIST: No, _no,_ please—please don’t. You’re… injured. And I don’t—I can’t ask you to—please sit down, Clovis.

_His voice is stern. Clovis sits, chuckling._

CLOVIS: Sorry. Got a little over-excited there.

ARCHIVIST: I wish I were as eager as you.

_The tape clicks off._

* * *

_And clicks on again, later._

ARCHIVIST: I managed to obtain a copy of Clovis McCormack’s medical records. It’s more or less what I expected. He was treated for severe puncture wounds and asphyxia, and a rather… _large_ amount of dirt was removed from his lungs and stomach. Nevertheless, he is alive, despite…

_The static rises._

ARCHIVIST: …spending nearly a week Buried ten meters beneath the Princess Diana Gardens in Bath.

_He sighs, static continuing to ebb and flow._

ARCHIVIST: I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that he was found with thick tree roots wrapped around him, penetrating deep into his skin. Or that, to the horror of the hospital staff, mud continued to seep from these wounds long after they stopped bleeding.

_The static recedes._

ARCHIVIST: It is strange to think that there are those who would find the Buried a comfort rather than a claustrophobic prison. But… no. I can’t justify using an 18-year-old to help me save a woman he doesn’t know. I’ll find another way. End recording.


End file.
